In his 'Preface to the Fourth Edition' of The Enemy Within, Seumas Milne confidently declares that the 'aftershocks of the miners' strike of 1984-5' (ix) are still being felt in 'Britain thirty years later' (ibid). He's not wrong. The conflict, waged like a civil war, 'pitted the most powerful and politicized trade union in the country against a hard-right Conservative administration bent on class revenge' (ibid). For most observers, the outcome was never in doubt, although Milne shows just how close society came to total collapse. In doing so, he exposes the connivance of the security services and politicians in breeding this industrial brinksmanship; he also reveals the lengths the government were prepared to go to in order to subvert, silence, and destroy Arthur Scargill and the National Union of Mineworkers. That no one has 'ever been called to account for any of these abuses of power' (xvi) infuriates Milne, for the destruction of the coal industry was an unnecessary war driven by 'political revenge' (xxi) and Thatcher's tyrannical urge to break working-class solidarity. Both these points are true, and Milne spends the rest of his terrifying book explaining how she did it.
Milne is in no doubt that the aftermath of the miners' strike paved the way for the triumph of Thatcher's neoliberal doctrine. But before she could dismantle the state and prioritise the wants of Big Business, she had to do away with Scargill, Britain's 'best-known trade unionist and unrepentant class warrior' (p.1). But why was she so keen on destroying Scargill? Well, because Scargill epitomised everything she hated, desperate as she was to 'avenge absolutely and unequivocally...[the Tory Party's] double humiliation at the hands of the miners in the historic strikes of 1972 and 1974' (p.6). To support this aim, Thatcher used all the powers at her disposal (whether they were legal or not) to ensure that the 'Facts were never allowed to get seriously in the way of a campaign that...offered the chance to destroy once and for all the symbol of militant class trade unionism that Scargill obstinately remained' (p.3).
So just what, exactly, was the strategy for bringing down Scargill? Basically, the Daily Mirror (guided by the nefarious Robert Maxwell) and the Cook Report unleashed a rotten campaign to expose Scargill as an embezzler. Yet the allegations were first published in 1990, five years after the end of the miners' strike. So this begs the obvious question: why go after Scargill again, especially when he'd already been defeated in 1985? Because the Tories felt that Scargill was still an influential rabble-rouser and bogeyman and one who, despite presiding over a smaller union, still commanded the utmost respect of the hard-left trade union movement. By discrediting the Scargill of 1990 the Tories felt they were discrediting the Scargill of the 1980s. They also wanted to shift attention away from the final pit closures, which publically proved that everything Scargill had predicted in the mid-1980s was coming to pass. So that's what they did, they hounded him, in the faint hope that they could prove that 'the Robespierre of the British labour movement, the sea-green incorruptible, the trade-union leader that ''doesn't sell out'', had been exposed as a grubby, silver-fingered union boss lining his pockets at his members' expense' (p.42).
And they nearly succeeded. Milne recounts the various intrigues in painstaking detail, a move which can make for torturous yet fully warranted repetition. There are numerous points in this book when the reader must stop to untangle the plenitude of threads that constitute this weird tapestry of lies. There are also a number of points when the reader must consult the 'List of Abbreviations' at the back, for this is an acronym-laden text populated by long-dead unions and union organisations. Anyhow, the main insults and slanders tossed at Scargill and his NUM associates are exposed for the fantastic concoctions they were. In fact, seeing the evidence on show, it makes you wonder how anyone could have believed the rubbish in the first place. That Scargill didn't shrivel into a paranoid ball of nerves is a testament to his character, because a lot of the stuff in this book reads like it's from the pages of an awful espionage novel. For instance, on page 343 alone, we are told of how someone 'repeatedly tried to force' Scargill's car off a road and down 'a steep incline', of how Scargill was walloped with an iron bar at a rally in Derby, which was completely missed by the masses of media present and which earned his assailant a 'nominal fine', and of how Scargill was 'shot at as he got out of the car in front of his Worsborough home'. Such, then, was the rather chilling persecution aimed at Scargill at the height of the miners' strike.
Milne lays the blame for most of these incidents at the door of the secret service. He even goes as far as to say that 'Britain's secret state remains a dangerous political and bureaucratic cesspit, uniquely undisturbed by any meaningful form of political accountability' (p.371). The evidence here is certainly damning, and Milne reiterates his view that without Thatcher's 'personal go-ahead, the operation[s] would have been illegal' (p.310). But one thing stands out more than anything else in this book: Milne's utter hatred of Thatcher and her free-market fundamentalism. Milne is happy to attack all those who call her reforms a success in creating wealth and delivering prosperity, for they did not such thing. No, Thatcher redistributed wealth from the poor to the rich (the higher profits going hand-in-hand with higher inequality) and slashed the workers' share of national income through privatisation, deregulation and her assault on the trade unions. In short, she achieved nothing but socialism for the rich, who distributed the profits among themselves, and socialism for the poor, who shouldered the burden of the national debt.
And we're still feeling the effects now, which is a point Milne reinforces in his 'Postscript to the Fourth Edition'. Here, he tells us that 'Two decades after The Enemy Within was first published, Britain's coal industry and miners' union have been all but destroyed; the country's power supply is in the grip of a profiteering private cartel; job and workplace insecurity has mushroomed; the security services are booming on the back of a ''war on terror'' without end; blacklisting of trade unionists and police infiltration of protest movements has flourished' (p.378), etc, etc. It's a grim litany of the disasters faced by the contemporary working class. Nevertheless, it also highlights the need for a truly radical agenda, and one which must act quickly to eradicate the insidious inequality unleashed by Thatcher and her Tory progeny. Whether it can be achieved remains to be seen. But, considering the composition of the current political forces, and their slightly differing versions of austerity, I wouldn't hold your breath. If anything, it seems like it's going to get a lot worse before it gets any better...
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